Isak

Tuesday's Headline News

My latest article over at RH Reality Check explores midwifery and home births--particularly in the light of the American Medical Association's and American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists' recent resolutions opposing home births.

It was a peculiarly fascinating article, one that gave me a chance to talk with many amazing folks and to learn an awful lot. I'd definitely like to follow up on this, not just with more articles, but by personally engaging with it. Forgive the vagueness, but I'll tell more once I see if what I'm thinking about is possible.

The piece begins:

While another profession might have the popular reputation of being the world's oldest, you can make a strong case that midwifery is a more realistic contender for that title. The tradition of caring for pregnant women and delivering babies in homes or community spaces is ancient the world over. And it's present today, in the providers who practice within an American medical culture in which 99% of births take place in hospitals, presided by OB/GYNs. ...

Today you need a license in the U.S. to practice psychotherapy and cosmetology, to drive trucks and to be a mortician -- but not to minister to laboring women in homes or in birthing centers. Or at least, not quite ...

How To Guarantee That Anna Will Read Your Article

You begin it with two paragraphs that are something like Jason Webber's opening for an article in the summer issue of Bitch. titled "Prince and the Revolution: Why the 5'2" singer is the biggest male feminist rock star of the last 25 years ... kinda":

Dig if you will the picture--the United States, 1982. Ronald Reagan is in his second year as the president who will have waited until 21,000 Americans have died of AIDS before discussing it in a speech. The Equal Rights Amendment once again fails to be ratified, thanks in large part to Phyllis Schlafly and the religious right. A Gallup poll reveals that 51 percent of Americans find homosexuality immoral.

And beamed onto television screens across this recession-plagued nation, from a fledgling cable channel known as MTV, a diminutive man, sporting a purple trenchcoat, mascara, heels, and the most lascivious smile this side of Rhett Butler gyrates on a soundstage, singing an innuendo-drenched song called "Little Red Corvette." His name is Prince, and he's come for your children.

I ... Can't ... Wait

What I will be orienting my weekend around.

REVIEW: Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

Michael Pollan's most recent investigative journalism wonder has got me bandying the word "nutritionism" about. I mean--he means--to describe a cultural ideology that places value on nutrients rather than food itself. That is, the parts rather than the whole. Unfortunately, decades of parsed nutritionist science--and the political wrangling that often intersected with it--have brought us to a point where most of what we're eating isn't really food. It's edible. It's chemically altered to be infused with a vitamin or fiber or what not. But as a product of nature, hardly. It's a product of a laboratory, and the scientists we are trusting with our health.

And now, as Pollan repeatedly points out, we're in the weird position of turning to investigative journalists like himself to find out what to eat; we're perhaps the first full generation so disconnected from our land and history, the great teachers of eating of those who came before us. There's a lot of profit from the widespread confusion over food--and a lot of illness too.

For my part, I find myself saying crap like "oh fish oil's really good for you" and "choose the tea with antioxidants in it," even though I have no idea what I'm talking about, and, as Pollan indicates, is playing into the food-as-parts rather than whole foods. It's a little frightening to see how susceptible I am to this food marketing, even when I've been more intentional about eating unprocessed, non-chemically soaked food in the last few years.

I think it's interesting that this book approaches food from a health vantage point; I hadn't really noticed it was missing from his other book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, which is a brilliant work that focuses on ethical and environmental nature of food. I rather assumed that it was all the same thing: what's ethically and environmentally good is also healthy for me. But I'm glad he's playing it out in this follow-up. He's a fantastic writer whose commentary leaves room for nuance--nothing's wholly one thing or another which is, um, just how life is. And his writing is compulsively readable.

It can be daunting to think that nothing less than a culture change is in order: Pollan is right about food not merely being 'fuel,' but inextricably tied to our social lives and work lives and family lives. I would've liked more from him on how to facilitate such a big change: he basically says, yes, food will cost more money and time, and it is worth it. I believe him. But while he makes a good case for anteing up the money (pointing out that it's not so much an issue of affordability for most of us as it is of priority, and he also advocates eating less), he gives less space to the time issue.

I'm not used to spending a good deal of time cooking my dinner and especially when I eat alone--now that I'm in my own apartment for the first time ever--I've found it difficult to create new habits where I make my meals a priority of time and effort.

I tried the night I finished In Defense of Eating. Cooked. Lit a candle. Took all the crap off the table I eat at. Even said a prayer before I dug in.

One guy I lived with at Haley House  led us through an exercise on retreat once, during a meal of lentils that he made and we ate with our hands, where he had us not pick up our next bite and hold it before us while we chewed. You merely had to swallow before preparing your next bite. And it was hard. I never realized I had this gulping habit of eating. That night Ifinished Pollan's book, I tried it again, putting down my fork between bites and it was still hard.

But I suppose there's nothing to do but be patient with it and myself. Pollan talks about mind tricks to play on yourself to adjust your eating habits (like using smaller plates, since so many of us fall victim to visual cues in our eating, rather than how we feel), and I'm thinking of one for me: approaching the table I eat at as if it were something of an altar. (The candle gave me the idea.) What if I didn't drop my shit on it, as I would never do to an altar? What if I considered it sacred space? How would that affect how I eat, whether I have guests or I'm by myself? I'm going to try.

Speaking of culture shift: there are so many skills that we've lost in this nutritionism era. There's so many finds at the farmer's market that I can't name, let alone cook. I find myself gravitating to carrots, tomatoes, the usual-looking things. But I want to learn about all that other stuff, and how to prepare it. I wonder where one can go? I need to ask friends and soon-to-be friends. Wouldn't it be cool to have an evening, or series of evenings, where friends taught each other how to prepare a food the other(s) don't know about? Not just a dish, but a dish where the primary ingredient is something the others barely recognize.

I think our culture's ready for this shift. The Food Network, all these foodie books, the popularity of farmer's markets, the rise of organic--it seems to me to be a broad-scale movement reacting against the tide of crap food and science written about in this book.

One last thing about culture: it irritated me that Pollan used "Mom "as a stand in for the "old" way of doing things, I guess because it doesn't resonate with my own experience. I've had a growing distaste for processed food for years, and when I come home to my parents, and my mom puts herself out to make me a meal that she thinks I will love, that she thinks is healthy, but that is very processed and doesn't appeal to me, what to do? Generally, I eat it anyway. Who wants to criticize a meal made for you? When I'm in their home?

But still, I'm frustrated by not being able to communicate that, after a few days, I really want something fresh. Or why I don't want to eat the canned peaches that are coated in sugar and preservatives that my dad tells me is good for me. I don't know how to follow my own instincts for how to feed myself without coming across like I'm judging my very kind and generous parents.

And The Nominees Are ...

... well, actually, that depends on you.

Here's the word: The New Media Women Entrepreneurs project is launching an awards program next year to honor the contributions of creative entrepreneurial women to news, information and ideas.

Who would you like to nominate an award candidate? What do you think? Andi Zeisler and/or Lisa Jervis of Bitch Magazine? Jill Filopovic of Feministe? brownfemipower, the ever-awesome? Carman Van Kerkhove of New Demographic, Racialicious and the great podcast, Addicted to Race? Nancy Gruver of New Moon Magazine, the pub I wish I had in my hands as a young girl? The brilliant Heather Corinna, the gal behind Scarleteen (and also a past Isak interviewee). Corinna, if I may quote myself, "was one of the first to carve out space for creative, compassionate, and informed sexuality on the Internet."

It'd be great to get some lit bloggers on the slate, be it Jessa Crispin of Bookslut, Maud Newton, or Sarah Weinman.

UPDATE: The New Media call-out comes with the announcement of this year's winners of the $10,000 awards. They are:

• Echo, a system of public storytelling installations in Atlanta. Led by Lila King and Karyn Lu, movers behind CNN's user-generated site, iReport.com.Watch their first video blog post.
• Latina Voices, a news site for and by Latinas. Led by Teresa Puente, a journalism professor at Columbia College Chicago and member of the Chicago Sun-Times. Read her first blog post.
• Northwest Navy News, a networking site for Puget Sound's military community. Led by Elaine Helm Norton, new media editor at The Daily Herald in Everett, Wash., and former military beat reporter. Read her first blog post.

And In Other News ...

Beyond the cover that everyone's talking about, Jill Lepore has a wonderfully thorough feature in the current New Yorker on "the battle that reshaped children's literature."

No, it's not Gossip Girls. Not The Babysitter's Club, not even Anne Of Green Gables (100th anniversary this year, as if you need reminding!) or The Adventure's of Tom Sawyer. Rather, it involved the strange confrontation between E.B. White and wildly influential New York librarian Anne Carroll Moore (she invented the children's library) about a strange little classic character named Stuart Little.

“I never was so disappointed in a book in my life,” Moore declared. She summoned Nordstrom to her rooms at the Grosvenor Hotel, where she warned her that the book “mustn’t be published.” To the Whites she sent a fourteen-page letter, predicting that the book would fail and that it would prove an embarrassment ...  Moore’s criticisms were severe: the story was “out of hand”; Stuart was always “staggering out of scale.” Worse, White had blurred reality and fantasy—“The two worlds were all mixed up”—and children wouldn’t be able to tell them apart. “She said something about its having been written by a sick mind,” E. B. White remembered. ...

“It is unnerving to be told you’re bad for children,” E. B. White admitted, “but I detected in Miss Moore’s letter an assumption that there are rules governing the writing of juvenile literature—rules as inflexible as the rules for lawn tennis. And this I was not sure of.” He shrugged it off: “Children can sail easily over the fence that separates reality from make-believe. They go over it like little springboks. A fence that can throw a librarian is as nothing to a child.”

Now, this might just be a humorous little historical aside, much like the stories of the fourth Supreme and the record company that rejected the Beatles. But more rode on this than pride. First of all, a lot of libraries did ban the book, and rather than being universally beloved, it found its critics in, say, Edmund Wilson who "was disappointed that (White) didn’t develop the theme more in the manner of Kafka."

Second, Katherine White--E.B.'s wife and a columnist on children's book--played an interesting role in the story. Third and most of all, the confrontation between Moore and White over the book triggered a--there's no other way to say it, so I'll have to repeat it--revolution in how children's fiction is approached.

One way to read “Stuart Little” is as an indictment of both the childishness of children’s literature and the juvenilization of American culture. Published just a year before Benjamin Spock’s “Baby and Child Care,” E. B. White’s “Stuart Little” might justifiably have been titled “The Birth of an Adult.” That or “Is Childbirth Necessary?” The Washington Post even ran a review in the form of an affectionate imitation of “Is Sex Necessary?,” right down to the idiotic sexologists. (“ ‘Lacks verisimilitude from the very first line,’ said Herr Von Hornswoggle. ‘Man or mouse, homo sapiens or Mus musculus—no little rodent can sail a ship in Central Park lagoon while still teething. Much, much too Jung.’ ”)

Whether Mrs. Frederick C. Little had given birth to a mouse or to a creature that just looked like a mouse was, especially in 1945, poignant social commentary about a culture that refused to look at the facts of life. The one thing Stuart wasn’t was a baby. No bottles, no diapers, no nighttime feedings, no prams, no cribs. No baby talk. From the first, Stuart dressed himself and was helpful around the house. The Littles’ biggest problem was that mice were so badly treated in children’s books. Mr. Little “made Mrs. Little tear from the nursery songbook the page about the ‘Three Blind Mice, See How They Run’ ” ...

... in (Katherine White's) next children’s-books column, she, in turn, vindicated (her husband), lamenting the pitiful state of a literature “careful never to approach the child except in a childlike manner. Let us not overstimulate his mind, or scare him, or leave him in doubt, these authors and their books seem to be saying; let us affirm.”

Who's In, Who's Out?

Guest Post
By Elizabeth Bovair

(WASHINGTON D.C) One weekend ago, I had the privilege of volunteering for College Summit. It's an organization founded on the belief that all students can achieve in secondary and post-secondary education. It works with students, teachers, and volunteers to equip low-income students with the skills necessary to successfully navigate the college application process.

The program has existed for about ten years and its participants have an 80% acceptance rate into four-year colleges. College Summit's mission is taken from the basic statistic that students from the low-income quartile who gets A's on standardized tests go to college at the same rate as their higher income peers who get D's on the same tests. Looking at this basic statistic, College Summit believes that the wits, the smarts, and the character of underprivileged students is hardly represented by the usual rankings. They have it in them to not only get into college, but to succeed. 

The program invites students from mostly under-resourced urban settings to college campuses around the country for four days. There, students meet with college counselors, writing coaches, peers; they leave the workshop with skills they need to succeed in college applications and a draft of a personal statement. What’s more, once students complete the four-day workshop, they return to their high schools and assist teachers in College Summit courses, helping their peers to also earn new and necessary skills for college success (let’s hear it for grassroots movements!). 

I volunteered at a workshop at the College of William and Mary, in Williamsburg, VA. My students were from downtown Washington, D.C. and Prince George’s County. They all had under a 3.0 GPA; the lowest was 1.9. None of my four students had yet taken any college entrance exams. 

Through a series of exercises and brainstorming sessions with other students, compelling life stories emerged that revealed the students’ passion, drive, and work ethic. One student compared herself to an “I-Pod on Viagra.” (Just think about that for a moment!  Incredible imagery!). I had another student liken himself to a graffiti-covered metro car—how many people see it as something ugly that’s been vandalized, while other people see it as art, creation, something to be cherished. And I had another student who, at age 11, had to take on the role of man of the house because his eldest brother had been beaten nearly to death and left paralyzed. This student wrote about his love for his brother and the difficulty in balancing responsibilities with his desire to have a normal teenager’s life. 

Slowly, together, we crafted essays that told these stories, and showed admissions counselors why these students have what it takes to succeed in college. Each one of my students left with a draft they could take home and re-work, and I am incredibly proud of each one of them. 

What I took home is an understanding of just how desperately we need to overhaul how we Americans view education. The sad fact is that some students I met will not get into college--and not because they aren’t talented. Instead, they’ve been forgotten.

In a world where the U.S. is facing competition from educated populations all over the world, now is not the time to abandon the students who do not have the opportunity to succeed. Rather, programs, like College Summit, work to give these students a chance (in some cases a mere fighting chance, but a chance nonetheless). It also encourages students to be leaders for their peers--in essence training an entire generation of leaders to be a positive influence within their communities.

All in all, I encourage anyone to volunteer for College Summit. Besides the program's website--which features volunteer opportunities and excerpts from student essays--learn more about the program via this feature from the New York Times and its profile on the PBS series, "Now."   

Finally, I would like to thank Anna for the opportunity to write a guest spot on her blog. ☺ (Ed. Note: You're welcome anytime, Beth!)

Image credits: The New York Times; College Summit

THANK YOU, 1980s: A 1984 Music Tryptich of Many Moods

"Drive," The Cars (By the way, if you haven't heard Ziggy Marley's cover of the song, what are you waiting for?)

"Love is a Battlefield," Pat Benetar

"Born in the USA," Bruce Springsteen; I can't embed the video, alas, because of some copyright issue. But the link will take you to it, and it's well worth the trip. This the song infamously misunderstood when President Ronald Reagan tried to use it has his presidential campaign theme in 1984; Republican nominee Bob Dole did use it as his campaign theme in 1996. In both cases, Springsteen took pains to publicly distance himself from the candidates; making clear that he did not endorse Reagan or Dole.

What's hilarious is that the campaigns must've missed the criticism of the Vietnam war in "Born in the USA," so subtle in lyrics like: "Got in a little hometown jam/So they put a rifle in my hand/Sent me off to a foreign land/To go and kill the yellow man" and "I had a brother at Khe Sahn/Fighting off the Viet Cong/They're still there, he's all gone." The song follows the point-of-view of a weary Vietnam vet who can't get a brak in the "land of opportunity." Springsteen has compared the misunderstanding of his fantastic song to the public understanding of Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land"--which Guthrie wrote in response to Irving Berlin's "God Bless America" and was meant to articulate "what America could have been about" rather than what it is (so far).

THANK YOU, 1980s: Akira Kurosawa

The legendary--and literary--Japanese filmmaker discussed the idea-ness of his films in a 1986 interview for Cineaste magazine. By the time of this conversation, Kurosawa had made 27 films, including 1980's "Kagemusha" and 1985's "Ran." "Ran" won him a nomination for a Best Director Academy Award, which somehow seems besides the point.

What follows is an excerpt of the interview, but check out the whole thing here. It's worth noting that this interview was translated into English. Not by me, you may be thankful. By the dude who talked up Kurosawa.

Cineaste: Once you said that the most important thing for young people aspiring to become directors was to read world classics. Do you still believe so?

Kurosawa: Definitely. To read everything is almost impossible, so you must find writers that you like. Then, to find favorite works of these writers, and read them again and again. Therefore, your understanding of the characters in these works is deepened. One’s level of understanding after reading a work once, and after reading it ten times, is naturally different. ...

…Balzac once said that the most important thing for novelists is to put up with the boring labor of writing line after line of the letters of the alphabet. These young people are not patient enough.… Furthermore, they don’t want to make the effort even to read novels. Though they believe themselves talented, they have nothing to show for it. ...

…Reading and writing should become habitual; otherwise, it is difficult. Nowadays, young assistant directors do not write screenplays, claiming that they are too busy. I used to write all the time. On location, a chief assistant director’s work was extremely hard and busy, so I used to write at midnight, in bed. I could easily sell such screenplays, and make more than my assistant directors salary. It meant that I could drink more. Therefore, I wrote, and I drank, then, when I got broke, I wrote again. My friends were waiting for me to write screenplays and make money for drinking. When we went to drink, we talked about films all the time.  ...

THANK YOU, 1980s: Jean-Michel Basquiat

'Untitled.' 1984. Acrylic and mixed media on canvas.

"Believe it or not, I can actually draw." ~ Jean-Michel Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat was barely out of his teens when he--a high school drop-out from Brooklyn, born to a Haitian-American father and Puerto Rican mother--broke into the international art scene in 1981. The cue came in part when Rene Ricard published "The Radiant Child" about him and his terrific talent in Artforum.

Basquiat was--it hurts to say it--27 when he died of a drug overdose in 1988.

Those years where high-pitch passionate prolific years for Basquiat. While his work was being shown in solo exhibitions across the U.S. and Europe, he was also marked by "the abundant contradictions, the public perceptions, mythifications and self-inventions that went into the shaping of Basquiat's life and work," as writer Robert Knafo describes:

In his short life (1960-1988), Jean-Michel Basquiat came to personify the art scene of the 80s, with its merging of youth culture, money, hype, excess, and self-destruction. And then there was the work, which the public image tended to overshadow: paintings and drawings that conjured up marginal urban black culture and black history, as well as the artist's own conflicted sense of identity.

He was, all at once it seemed, the ultimate party animal, a wannabe streetkid and grafittist hiding his black Brooklyn middle class roots, an advocate and interpreter of the marginal and dispossessed at the court of the mainstream, an angry black aspirant to the all-white art canon, a precocious talent, a creature of cynical marketing and a fraud, a proto-multiculturalist, an American original.

His paintings remind me a bit of Frida Kahlo's, with their scratchiness and skeletons, the juxtaposition of vibrant colors with an obsession with mortality, the humor within the paintings' religiousity and worldliness. Something about the heightened energy in art that speaks of blood and bodies hits me hard. I love how he uses words as a visual medium in both his graffiti and his paintings.

'In Italian.' 1983. Acrylic, oil paintstick, and marker on canvas mounted on wood supports, two panels.

Before he entered Celebrityville, Basquiat built an underground fame for himself in his teens as a graffiti artist/poet who marked Lower Manhattan and signed his work "SAMO." Among his markings:

SAMO as a neo art form.

SAMO as an end to to mindwash religion, nowhere politics and bogus philosophy.

SAMO as an escape clause.

SAMO as an end to playing art.

SAMO as an end to bogus pseudo intellectual. My mouth, therefore an error. Plush safe.. he think.

SAMO as an alternative 2 playing art with the 'radical chic' sect on Daddy's $ funds.

By 1982, he was quite close with Andy Warhol, who served as something of a mentor to him up until Warhol's death in 1987; the pair also collaborated on a number of interesting works.

I first became acquainted thanks to this brilliant 1996 film (and a friend I like to call Fred Chao). And yes, that's David Bowie perfectly cast as Andy Warhol.

'Untitled.' 1984.

Image Credits: Village Savant, The Brooklyn Museum, Barnard College Library Research Guide